At the start of Michael Chabon's second novel, Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp, a fat, 40ish, 6-foot-3 academic in small-town Pennsylvania, is laboring on his fourth novel, Wonder Boys, already over a thousand pages long and with five possible endings involving biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths. He's trying to complete it before his best friend and longtime editor, Terry Crabtree, arrives to give a lecture at the college where Tripp is trapped in the chicken coop of teaching fiction.

This, then, is that agreeable and ironic staple, the novelist's novel about a novelist and his novel. What makes this wise, wildly funny story much more than that is the fact that Chabon is a flat-out wonderful writer—evocative and inventive, pointed and poignant.

Tripp and Crabtree have enjoyed a great era of friendship since “before stars were lost from certain constellations.” Tripp's dad, a cop and Korean War vet, died at the poker table in the back room of the Alibi tavern, after having shot the first Jew to graduate from Coxley College. Crabtree's dad was a Pentacostal preacher out in Hogscrotum County, Mo., and his mother the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. (“She can make you anything,” he says. “She made me a homosexual.”)

The two men met in a writing workshop at school, when each rewrote the same little-known story by an anonymous, kindly, self-loathing writer called August Van Zorn. This bond, and that of their subsequent mutual substance abuse, becomes strained when Crabtree arrives (wearing an Italian suit the color of the back of a dollar bill) and announces that he is about to be fired from his publishing job. Therefore he needs a winner of a book to salvage his career—and it doesn't look as if Tripp's soggy tome is going to be finished in time.

“What's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to my book?” Tripp wonders, as he goes about further tangling his already entangled life. His third wife, Emily Warshaw, has abandoned him, leaving a farewell note on the fridge; his lover, Sara Gaskell, the provost of the college and a sturdy women whose wardrobe consists of tweed suits running the spectrum from oatmeal to dirt, reveals that, at age 45, she's pregnant; and his favorite writing student, James Leer, is spotted in the garden with a small pistol aimed at his head.

Tripp braces himself with the whole praxis of reckless living: Pot for “the heaviness of heart, vitamin C for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog.” He makes love to Sara in the greenhouse—where she forces forsythia and pinches chrysanthemums—and searches his feelings (“an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawlspace under the house”).

He takes James, in his trademark overcoat that emanates the odor of bus station, to Sara's husband Walter's secret closet to see the jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe when she married Joe DiMaggio, a trip that goes awry when Sara's dog Doctor Dee gnaws at his leg and James feels obliged to shoot it. He joins Emily's family for a Korean Jewish passover, wishing vaguely for a reconciliation and hoping to commemorate once again “the start of a long trip across a small desert by an ill-behaved rabble of former slaves.” He bonds with his erstwhile father-in-law, Irv, a simple man who is sad at funerals, proud of Israel, disappointed in his children and happy on the 4th of July.

As the plot thickens to bean soup with a lovesick female student, a fictional-turned-real car thief and a literary party for the famous Q., the unexpected expectedly happens: Crabtree discovers the knapsack stuffed with James’ manuscript, “The Love Parade.” Set in the mid-1940s, in an anthracite-black town in the barren Pennsylvania landscape of the boy's soul, it is, Crabtree decides at once, the very novel that will save his publishing career.

Tripp turns morose. “I saw,” he says, “that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground: an unsuccessful, overweight, ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.” With Crabtree now regarding him as if he were simply a nobody headed nowhere, he decides, “I had become the hero of a story by August Van Zorn.”

But, for old times sake, and to save their protege, Tripp and Crabtree have one last reckless, stupid fling, rescuing James from his movie memorabilia-packed dungeon at his parents’ home and then from the police called out by Sara's husband. Tripp produces the Marilyn Monroe jacket the student is accused of stealing; considers, while looking at the Gaskells, the perpetual gulf between the commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men; thinks of Doctor Dee lying dead in a nylon bag (“He had spent his entire life feverishly trying to communicate some important message that no one had understood and that had now died with him, undelivered”) and starts to cry.

Throughout the book, Tripp has been haunted by the specter of a well-known writer (“Sad Tidings,” “Kind of Blue,” “Eight Solid Light-Years of Lead”) who fell into oblivion after failing to complete his fifth novel. He sees himself headed down that same path, helpless to stop his slide.

At the start of the story, he tells us about the impossibility of ending his novel: “I had too much to write; too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name … too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers … too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury … too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever … fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.” As Crabtree departs, Tripp resumes his labors.

Chabon's brilliant first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, seemed to suggest that anything is possible. Splendid, solid, sure-footed, wry, Wonder Boys implies that anything is impossible as well.